Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, the History of Europatcheling,

Part 8, 1450-1500ish. I have spoken many times of the network I belong to, a Gora podcast

network, this month's featured podcast is Lanzerv Leviathan, a wide-ranging podcast on

political science and international relations. If you want to find out more, hop along to

www.Lanzerv Leviathan.com or indeed download it from iTunes or your normal podcatcher.

Now than everyone, we are broadly speaking in a sort of sweep-up mode.

So this week I thought, hey, it's a while since we've spoken of the history of Europe

and not even England, despite the channel, operated in a vacuum but was part of a greater

chrysanthem. So I thought it would be a good idea to bring us all up to date with a general

situation in Europe so that you can see what influences and concerns would have been playing

on the minds of the English political classes. This episode is of course a complete travesty,

a joke. Half a century of European history in 30 minutes or so, what?

So I will endeavour just to give you the highest level story I can but you know me,

as certainly as the jattravatured people of Vittfoodle 6 will one day see the coming of the great

white hankerchief I'll end up getting dragged into detail. So let me just flag up those big

themes for you at the beginning so that you can tick them off and keep them in your head.

So it's a period where the crisis of Christendom deepens, an increasingly

venal and temporal papacy, the failure of war against the heretic husites in Bohemia,

dragged into the wars of the Italian peninsula along with the Empire of France and Spain.

The rise of the independent nation state or the start of that with the appearance of

standing armies and central taxation. In eastern Europe it's the end of the line for the Roman

Empire at Constantinople and the seemingly inexorable rise of the Ottoman Empire.

...